“I hope they’ll mobilize the Alpine troops and search the crevasses. No one’s doing anything for us! What a lousy government!”
XXI. The Blue Peril
The mobilization of the Alpine troops had been an accomplished fact for some time. Under the pretext of maneuvers—in order, it appeared, to avoid a fresh outbreak of public panic—the administration had ordered military searches, and each garrison had taken up arms in turn. Bugey had been explored from top to bottom, without awakening any suspicion. The officers’ reconnaissance missions were in accordance with the Sûreté’s inquiries; the army and the police operated in parallel. Inspector Garan, putting his errors behind him, had cooperated many times in the shrewdest strategies. Neither in the Alps nor in Bugey, however, had any glimpse been caught of the sarvant.
The hovels of the suburbs, the cellars and sewers of the towns, the subterranean workings of old dungeons, the quarries, the chasms, the caves, the forests, the crypts of ruins and the catacombs of abbeys were explored without result. The robbers’ lair remained an enigma. The dirigibles and airplanes ready to launch themselves in pursuit of the phantom balloon remained inactive, and those which patrolled the atmosphere above the bleak solitudes came back from the wild goose chase empty-handed.
At the moment when Dr. Monbardeau was demanding the mobilization of the Alpine forces and fulminating against the government, therefore, the work to which the State had devoted itself in Bugey and the surrounding areas has been under way for some time, with a discretion motivated not so much by the need not to alarm the citizens—it seems to us, on the contrary, that the sight of troops would have reassured them—as by the fear that it might all be a monumental joke. The Camelots du Roy,19 for example, were capable of any impertinence, when it came to making the present régime look ridiculous.
In truth, it had been decided that this State endeavor would continue to the end—but it produced several suggestive disappearances of advance sentinels and solitary agents, and they were obliged to cut the phenomenal hunt short in order to avoid refusals to obey orders and defections.
The existence of the sarvants was not officially recognized; the researches carried out throughout France, and even beyond, were even more carefully hidden—for, without knowing why their field of action was restricted to the Bugist regions, and extended so gradually, it was suspected that the brigands went a long way to deposit their captives. The frustration of local searches seemed to establish that.
Powerless to discover what was going on, and fearing the extension of an evil whose gravity became increasingly clear from day to day, the government threw away its mask and attempted to organize a protective system, with the aim of circumscribing the scourge. It decreed preventative measures—prophylactic dispositions, so to speak—applicable throughout the territory. The populations that had not been subject to the tyranny of the sarvants then began to fear it. It could only augment its empire insensibly, of course—but within it was the abomination of desolation.
The administrative services and social life were no longer functioning. The region was gradually being emptied of its inhabitants. Since the kidnapping of Mademoiselle Le Tellier and her cousins, every abduction had provoked further departures. Trains crammed full of peasants arrived in Lyon and Chambéry, and the Swiss border saw an exodus of French refugees. Panic suddenly took hold of them; to subsist, moreover, they sold their livestock at a knockdown price, some of them surrendering their fields and farmhouses, and they fled, glad to have found buyers. They were rich; others had not the means to get away—fifteen thousand, perhaps. The latter lived on nothing, barricaded in their houses as if in the depths of animal-dens. No one communicated with his neighbor; but news reached them somehow, transformed and magnified, redoubling their anxiety. Robert’s eagle was the giant bat known as a “vampire” and Philibert’s fish took on the form of a flying shark, a dragon or a tarasque of Gothic times.20
Around the condemned villages, the crops that no one harvested were going yellow. The grass in the meadows grew tall and thick; the vines became entangled with long flexible stalks and grass turned the surfaces of the white roads green. A deathly silence was everywhere.
Sometimes a vagabond risked a robbery. Bands of thieves also came forth in the hope of looting abandoned properties. Suddenly, though, horrible screams went up from inside houses or in the distant countryside: battles of men against mad dogs, or forgotten cats, or against rival gangs, against fear, or even against…no one knew what. After a while the looters no longer came. From that day on, the only human beings to be seen wandering in the fields and woods were wretched lunatics, whose number grew by the hour. They emerged from their voluntary jails under the domination of puerile ideas, products of fear and claustration. Half-naked, at a loose end, the unfortunates wandered randomly, nourishing themselves on grains and roots. The sarvants, rumor had it, chose some of them; the majority committed suicide.
It was not rare, in fact to find hanged men dangling from trees and signposts at crossroads, having fled from fear into death. Across the valley, a succession of pylons sustained the electric cables from Bellegarde to Lyon; almost all of them had served as ladders for desperate individuals who electrocuted themselves by touching the cables. Charred mummies twisted in simian postures at the summits of these miradors, seemingly playing the fool between them. The rivers carried floating corpses, heralds of the plague of fear. The railway was a rendezvous of crushed bodies, over which a great stink hung. Thanks to the flocks of crows that descended upon the region, however, the charnel-house quickly became an ossuary.
Posterity will be astonished by such a debacle, because it will forget how human beings understood the calamity. It was no longer a persecution by bullies, no longer a stratagem of pirates. It was the end of the world. In anguish, people evoked the beasts of the Apocalypse that had been seen in the sky: a calf, an eagle, a pike. For them, the sarvant became the Exterminating Angel, and they believed that Jehovah was beginning to depopulate the Earth, starting with Bugey.
Ten centuries before, the same alarm had spread. The terrors of the year 1912 were equal to those of the year 1000—and if they were less generalized, at least they had a raison d’être, while the others were the offspring of ineradicable fantasy.21
It seemed that an epidemic was infesting that fraction of humankind. Indeed, the persecutors might carry you off unexpectedly, without anyone being able to do anything about it, as is often the case with cholera. As in times of cholera, the survivors maintained the expressions of pursued slaves, in which fear as forever imprinted. They did not even wonder where the missing persons had gone. No one doubted that they had been massacred. The women wept a little whenever they thought about them; that provided a fortunate trigger, and they found a momentary relief in their tears. Laughter was no more than a vague memory in the utmost mental depths of paradise lost. All hearts were constructed, especially by night.
The nights were spent listening, on the lookout for the notorious hum. All of them thought they could hear it. They perceived it by autosuggestion. And when dawn broke in its canicular splendor, roasting the innumerable carrion outside, then, through a gap in the door, a crack in the wall, or between two dislocated tiles, the poor folk would stare at the imperturbable sky, limpid and blue, streaked with swallows: the untrustworthy sky, with its mask of serenity. All day long, they contemplated that blinding azure. Their dazzled eyes saw colorless little undulating worms appear, which disappeared when you tried to look at them. They were frightening themselves with the blood-vessels of their own eyes.
The murmur of the season disguised itself as a redoubtable hum. Sixty times a minute, they thought they could distinguish something or other. Many claimed to have glimpsed the ascension of various creature and objects, climbing alone and vertically into the atmosphere—but they would not have sworn to it, strongly suspecting that they were poor sentries.
Mirastel was the last château still to be occupied. Madame Arquedouve and her daughter Lu
cie were hardly transportable, and Monsieur Le Tellier clung on to the idea that he would find his children there, where the sarvants had captured them. The departmental representatives took advantage of the circumstance and demanded a detailed report on the situation from him.
In the wake of that report, they wanted to apply a new defensive tactic, but the official delegates in Bugey only stayed there for a week. That hell tested the strongest wills, the worst ambitions and the most hardened braveries.
The entire Earth was then keeping watch on Bugey. It was a gangrenous patch whose horrid spread was fearfully tracked—an invasive ulcer so incurable that the entire world, with sweat on its brow and brooding eyes, kept an incessant check on the progress of the French cancer. The international press turned into a sanitary bulletin.
San Francisco was no longer smiling.
As the whole Earth kept watch on Bugey, the whole of Bugey kept watch on the sky. From one end of the region to the other, that was the only thing that mattered. People made light of everything but that. No one was interested in the fattening of pigs, the impending vintage, the withering hay, the flourishing rye, the propitious or unfavorable temperature, and any municipal quarrels. Fortune and poverty no longer counted for anything; politics had lost its importance. A war might have broken out, an invasion might have threatened the old world, or the yellow peril might have descended upon Europe—what would it have mattered?
Only one concern merited anxiety. Only one danger was worthy of being avoided: THE BLUE PERIL.
Part Two: Where. When. Who. Why.
I. The Square Patch
The Blue Peril! Die Blaue Gefahr! Le Péril Bleu! El Peril Azul! Il Perile Azzuro!—that journalistic term enjoyed the same success as its cousin, the word “sarvant.” Its employment became universal, and it exercised a most curious influence upon the world’s thinking.
The power of words knows no limits. The new evil had been designated as the Blue Peril because the aggressors came from the sky; soon, though—as if to verify the inanity of worldly investigations—by virtue of continually reading, saying and hearing “Blue Peril,” people were no longer inclined to believe merely that the villains took refuge in a terrestrial stronghold after having utilized the sapphire highway, but that that the enemy was the sky itself.
A reasoning process was required to bring matters to this point. The immense difficulty of the searches was observed; attention was called to the myriads of explorers in the process of hunting the sarvants’ hiding-place; and the number of places on the vast globe that might escape their perspicacity was calculated. Virgin forests, unclimbable mountains and caverns whose opening were almost imperceptible were considered, as were subterranean fortresses and submarine bases—but the idea of water led back to the idea of the air, and once again the calmest minds found themselves examining the sky as one keeps watch on a brigands’ lair. It was a singular mistrust, and it was singularly widespread, since the astronomers allowed themselves to be drawn into it.
Yes, it is scarcely credible: the familiars of the ether, the confidants of Elohim, no longer envisaged the object of their study as it had previously been and should reasonably still have been. It did not matter that nothing had changed in celestial mechanics; more than one Laplace confessed the emotion that he had felt in considering the firmament, and the calculations of observatories overflowed with errors in the year 1912.
Monsieur Le Tellier followed the example of his colleagues. It is not that the sky had retained its former charm for him, nor that the astronomer felt obliged to work for the moment on professional projects; misfortune had brought his attention back to the affairs of this world, and since his departure from Paris, Monsieur Le Tellier had not directed the smallest optical instrument at any planet whatsoever. Sometimes, however, in the course of an enfevered evening, he leaned on a windowsill in the fresh air, looking out into the night, and meditated, not as a physicist reflects but as a desperate dreamer. He no longer saw the stars with a scientist’s eyes, as universes about which he knew everything that a man of today could know; he saw them as brilliant points that had a magical aspect. The moons, the suns, Mars and Venus, Saturn, Aldebaran, Cassiopeia and Hercules were no longer, for him, objects of analysis and mathematical reasoning designated by letters of the Greek alphabet; they were auroral seeds scattered in the darkness—and now, most of all, he stared at the blackness between the stars.
The images of his son and daughter no longer quit his retina. Their memory filled his soul. He imagined them in the heart of Africa, in a citadel surrounded by impenetrable lianas, then in the bosom of Mont Blanc or the Himalayas, prisoners in dungeons deeper than mines, then held captive under the sea, in bizarre steel cells. Finally, succumbing to the contagion, he interrogated the sky with a terrified gaze and whispered: “The Blue Peril!”
With an effort, though, he shook off the absurd obsession, rebuked himself harshly for having yielded to it, and, in order to chase it away and sanitize his ideas, he forced himself to choose a star in a constellation, to rehearse the history of its knowledge, and to recite its spatial and temporal numbers. As you might guess, the star that most frequently solicited his gaze in these scientific moments was Vega, or Alpha Lyrae—the Vega whose observation he had suspended in order to come to Mirastel, leaving behind the work that he had intended to continue a fortnight later, but still had not resumed after two months. Monsieur Le Tellier contented himself, therefore, with the spectacle of the beautiful white star toward which the Sun is taking us. It seemed to be waiting for him, and he admired its striking pallor for a long time.
On July 6, at about 1 a.m., fleeing a bed-alcove haunted with nightmares, he went on to the balcony and sought out the star Vega. It had reached the culminating point of its orbit; it was about to pass very close to the zenith, a few degrees to the south. To see it, he had to tilt his head back and look almost at the very center of the sky. It was gliding from left to right, innocent and serene.
As it cut across the meridian, though—which is to say, having reached the summit of its course—it suddenly went out.
Monsieur Le Tellier stood bolt upright. He had not recovered from his stupor when the star shone again, more beautifully than before, and continued its rotation around the Earth, sinking toward the west.
The astronomer’s eyes no longer left it. Intoxicated with energy and curiosity, he followed it passionately until the morning, which effaced it. He had watched unfailingly for the recurrence of a phenomenon that his expert eye had not had the opportunity to observe again. He then attributed it to an optical aberration caused by fatigue and enervation, and went to sleep.
When he woke up, however, he reconsidered the matter. Hmm! A hallucination? Perhaps—but he doubted it. In any case, the apparent extinction had not been produced by a scintillation of longer duration than usual; he was sure of that. The star’s disappearance had lasted too long for that—an interval that his long experience estimated at five seconds. Then again, no, no—he really had witnessed the momentary disappearance of Vega, and nothing known or anticipated could explain it. The most reasonable explanation was to suppose that an asteroid had passed the star, provoking its occultation—but a dark bolide? Hmm…hmm…
It is important to specify that Monsieur Le Tellier possessed an absolute assurance that no bird or aerostat had interposed itself between Vega and his eye. To mask a first magnitude star for five seconds would have required the intervention of a bird or aerostat so close to the spectator that it would have been clearly observable in the luminous night.
This little stellar incident, observed by such a man, took on a capital importance. Monsieur Le Tellier ruminated over that detail, which another man would not even have perceived, all day long. The result of his deliberations was that he repaired at dusk to the tower observatory, carefully took an inventory thereof, tested the movement of the clockwork and the equatorial telescope, cleaned the lenses, opened a crack in the dome to expose an arcade of void, and then—thus having reveale
d the band of space in which Vega described its curve—set his watch to sidereal time and aimed his telescope at a point on the horizon. That done, he waited impatiently for the rise of the star: the dawn of that enormously distant sun, which had mingled ex abrupto with his gravest preoccupations, engaging his interest from thousands of kilometers away at the precise moment when he was asking himself: “Where are the sarvant’s victims?”
That thought was burning in his brain. And when Vega appeared—when he saw the blinding star in the middle of the nocturnal disk cut out by the objective lens—he was obliged to stiffen himself.
“Come on, then, weakling!”
With a flick of the thumb be switched on the clockwork mechanism, and the obedient telescope accompanied the star in its course.
It was a fine astronomical telescope for an amateur. It was a meter long and magnified a modest fifty times—but the magnification was of no importance with regard to Vega itself, dazzling as it was; the best telescopes cannot make the stars seem any closer, because they are too far away, and only serve to make them clearer. In any case, Monsieur Le Tellier was beginning to suspect was only playing a walk-on part in the drama, for time went by without his observing the slightest anomaly in the star’s conduct.
Midnight sounded.
Monsieur Le Tellier did not leave the ocular lens. Anyone but as astronomer would have grown weary of it, but he maintained clear sight and an alert mind. The star and he examined one another. The clockwork, regulated in accordance with the movement of the heavens, hummed discreetly, and the little telescope reared up with a uniform and gradual progression, neutralizing the rotation of the Earth and constraining the observer to change position continually.
Soon, the tube was almost vertical, aimed seven degrees to the south of the zenith. Vega passed its culmination once again, and Monsieur Le Tellier, lying down with his head laid flat on the ground, shivered.
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